Immigration win for Don

A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday backed the government’s authority to lock up immigrants awaiting deportation after they got out of prison following criminal convictions, giving President Trump a win in his war on illegal immigration.

The court ruled 5-4, with the conservative justices in the majority and liberal justices dissenting, that the feds could pick up such immigrants and lock them up anytime, not just right after they finish their sentences.

The ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito, left open the possibility of immigrants challenging the 1996 federal law involved in the case — the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act — on constitutional grounds.

They could argue that their rights to due process would be violated if they were still detained long after they completed their sentences.

The law at issue states that the government can detain convicted immi- grants “when the alien is released” from criminal detention.

Civil-rights lawyers for two groups of plaintiffs argued that the language of the law shows that it applies only immediately after immigrants are released.

Team Trump countered that the government should have the power to detain such immigrants anytime.

It is not the court’s job, Alito wrote, to impose a time limit for when immigrants can be detained after serving a prison sentence.

Alito noted that the court repeatedly has said in the past that “an official’s crucial duties are better carried out late than never.”

He said the challengers’ assertion that immigrants had to be detained within 24 hours of ending a prison sentence is “especially hard to swallow.”

In the dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer questioned whether Congress “meant to allow the government to apprehend persons years after their release from prison and hold them indefinitely without a bail hearing.”